Enjoying the typos, or: Armitage throws down the gauntlet and Servetus picks it up

“How much do you think I enjoyed the typos, Mr. Armitage?” Servetus remarked, grinning.

Thorin Oakenshield / Richard Armitage as one of Santa’s Elves in cap from jib-jab cutout video, here. My cap.

Family tradition to take center stage as son pursues acting fame

(London: Reuters)

Even as an international furor erupted over his style and punctuation choices, as Christmas Eve turned to Christmas Day, a closing salutation by Richard Armitage in his message to fans continued to puzzle Armitage-watchers worldwide. Research reveals that the answer to the question about the meaning of the salute, “Enjoy the typos!” lies in an old family tradition.

Responses to “THE message” come fast and furious

Fangrrls worldwide were literally all atwitter as the time zones woke up, one by one, on December 24th. The most technologically up-to-date were capable only of cryptic tweets of ecstasy as they responded to the 2011 Christmas message from Richard Armitage, star of North & South (2004), Spooks (2008-2010), and The Hobbit: The Unexpected Journey (2012).

“!!!!!!!” more than one fan tweeted, for an entire 140 characters. Others used vocabulary intelligible only to Armitage fan insider groups, generating a brief rise in the peach futures market, as peach growers who follow twitter were confused by the occasional use of an insider term. Members of this group were often so excited that they forgot to include the obligatory #richardarmitage hashtag, drawing into doubt the likelihood that the actor will trend again anytime soon.

In commenting, fans of the educated, middle-aged, protective, BBC4-listener sort noted suspicions that exactly this was what Armitage sought to achieve by disseminating his missive in a way calculated to render every fan who read it speechless for at least two hours. The modest thespian is well known for shying away from publicity and for having expressed fears about what would happen if he tweeted.

Members of this latter group were nonetheless equally pleased with the message, if somewhat wordier in expressing their responses and offering interpretations. “It’s clear,” said one thrilled woman, “that the presence of so few apostrophes, all correctly placed, signals the complete success of his covert Christmas campaign of last year, ‘Apostrophes for Armitage Admirers’. All of the feral apostrophes have found homes with fans, and there just weren’t any leftover for RA to misplace.”

“It’s also a sign of a major development in his career,” another fan reported. “Now that he’s no longer being cast in roles that require the Northern English accent, he can actually pronounce the consonants at the beginnings and endings of words and no longer needs to keep so many apostrophes lying around.”

“But he’s still remaining faithful to his career roots,” enthused a third fan, “by leaving out the definite article in front of the date of Christmas!” Overwhelmed by his decision to write “25th,” instead of “the 25th,” she swooned again before she could be asked further questions.

This optimistic take on Armitage’s punctiliousness with the apostrophe was relativized to some extent by other sources contacted for comment.

Responding directly to the role that “northern” roles had played in Armitage’s career, a Yorkshire dialect group contacted for comment was busy making posters that featured pictures of John Standring with the label: “it’s t’25th, y’daft owd bugger!” Although the group refused to make any official statement until their protest begins on Boxing Day (and members remain divided over whether to demonstrate on Christmas, fearing that spectators and sympathizers might be confused by seeing signs about “t’25th” on the 26th of December), sources inside the group revealed a strong feeling of betrayal among Yorkshire fans, who’d expected to continue to see apostrophes play a major role in Armitage’s Christmas messages.

Richard Armitage as Heinz Kruger. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

American dialect groups, too, resisted the wave of euphoria that appeared to be sweeping the fangrrrls. “After we agreed to stop our protests when he played a U.S. government bureaucrat named after an American university in an American film this summer,” a spokesperson for a PAC called AMERICANS FOR SUPERHERO FILM IMMIGRATION REFORM NOW! STOP BRITS FROM PLAYING GERMANS WHO ARE JUST PRETENDING TO BE U.S. CITIZENS, “we feel he owes it to us at the very least to spell his verbs correctly.” Speaking from an undisclosed location dug deep into a deactivated Minuteman bunker in South Dakota, the man stressed that he wished to remind readers that Americans “scarf down” their holiday meals rather than “scoffing” them.

On the theme of Armitage’s eating habits, a spokeswoman from Weight Watchers weighed in to urge the peripatetic actor to eat more carefully and more slowly. “It’s probably that yo-yo dieting that he does for these roles,” she commented on condition that her name not be revealed, “along with the dwarfs’ heavy consumption of ale in their free time, that makes him want to gobble. Plus,” she added, “his mum will be happier if he relishes his food rather than simply stuffing it down, and all boys want to please their mums at Christmas.”

Sibulele Gcilitshana kisses Richard Armitage in gratitude for his recognition of the problem with a shortage of exclamation points to write click consonants in African languages, in Strike Back 1.4. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com. Gcilitshana has an alveolar click consonant in the first consonant of her last name, but Xhosa writes these consonants with Latin letters rather than the IPA symbols.

But dialect and style-related comments prevailed among non-fangrrl responses to the message. “It’s actually quite remarkable of him. Most people aren’t aware of this problem at all,” said the publicity chair for the group UK CITIZENS UNITED FOR GREEN USE OF PUNCTUATION, a group that’s become notorious for urging the use of the term “eleventy” to substitute for multiple exclamation points and its campaign, “Every word deserves all its consonants.” She tells us: “First-world demands for exclamation points due to texting and tweeting have driven prices steeply upward. But speakers of some African languages need this punctuation mark just to speak or to say the name of their language. These languages are literally becoming extinct, and so some language reformers have urged the substitution of the apostrophe to write the alveolar click in hopes of saving the languages.” She continued, “Richard Armitage is well known not only for his linguistic deftness, but also for his awareness of the troubles of the oppressed. He probably became aware of this issue while on location for the shooting of Strike Back. With his restrained use of both exclamation points and apostrophes in his holiday message, he has probably decided to ensure that enough of both are available to Khoisan language speakers at this important holiday time.” Confronted with Armitage’s own commission of an eleventy in the closing line of his message, the publicity chair cut off the interview abruptly.

A final explanation for Armitage’s punctuation style was offered at the Institute for Worldwide English Punctuation Conformity. Its president, Harmonious Doublestop, noted that commas are one of the biggest issues of contention between authors on one side of the Atlantic and their editors on the other. “The fights over the Oxford comma,” he began, and cringed, his eyes filling with tears. “Well, I just can’t speak of it.” Pressed for further comment, he noted, “Armitage’s ongoing use of the comma, instead of the semi-colon, to join independent clauses in a series may indicate a future push on the actor’s part to simplify this particular usage rule, but I can’t imagine that English and American copy editors could ever get on board with that. On the other hand,” he continued, “German students of English would welcome this change, which would bring English comma usage closer to German, where independent clauses can be joined via comma with impunity.”

To close this section, we merely note the press release from the Study Centre for Plurals of Greek vs Latin words, stating that Armitage’s inability to identify correctly the plural of “hypothalamus” indicates the ongoing need for widespread social alertness to this ongoing problem, which plagues even university instructors who refer (incorrectly) to their semester plans for courses as “syllabi.”

“Enjoy the typos”: The REAL explanation

Amidst the huge furor generated by Armitage’s message, digging deeper for the real context of the statement produced valuable intel from sources close to the actor’s youth. A neighbor of the Armitage family confirms, “’Enjoy the typos!’ is a long-standing Armitage family greeting, something his parents would say at Christmastime instead of “Merry Christmas”! The family passed out Christmas cards with typographical, stylistic, and grammatical errors during the holidays and when a friend or neighbor came over to point out the error, he or she would be treated to some wassail and a group reading of Fowler‘s. In fact, that’s where young Richard got some of his first dramatic experience.”

Pressed for comment on Fowler’s, the spokesman for AMERICANS FOR SUPERHERO FILM IMMIGRATION REFORM NOW! remarked only, “Well, that certainly explains why — just like the average Brit — he can’t distinguish between ‘which’ and ‘that’.”

“As I remember it,” reports another neighbor, “the boys always had a lot of fun with the family tradition, since they were responsible for creating the typos. One year in particular an exchange student from Iowa was living here, and he was really struggling with the placement of his ‘u’s. Almost had to leave school over it! The Armitage family absolutely took that boy under their wing, although the friendship was challenged when they had to deal with the ‘s’ vs. ‘z’ question in certain verbs.”

Friends from Armitage’s days in musical theater and drama school remain characteristically close-mouthed on this question, but a close friend from Armitage’s LAMDA days who is currently working in a Spanish-language children’s show as a dancing upside-down question mark was persuaded to recount his memories of the developing actor’s cultivation of the “Enjoy the typos!” tradition. “Si, he was extremely enthusiastic,” the man noted. “He even said that if ever hit the big time, he didn’t want to have fans at all unless he could play ‘Enjoy the typos!’ with them at Christmastime.” He declined further questions, however, noting that standing on his head all the time was extremely stressful in the face of increased demand for his services, particularly in the United States, where he has specialized in genre roles involving inverted punctuation.

The The Hobbit star himself was reported by his publicist to be spending the holiday in seclusion, and could not be reached for comment. Fangrrls suspect that he would decline to explain what he meant he was saying, anyway. Sources close to the dwarfy actor, however, have revealed that instead of celebrating Christmas, the entire Armitage family was attending an article advisory retreat. This event is being held in preparation for what journalists anticipate will be a lengthy style discussion once The Hobbit premieres: whether the definitive article must be doubled when using the film title as an adjective (“The The Hobbit star…”, or whether the film title can only be used as part of an adjectival prepositional phrase (“The star of The Hobbit…”). The Armitages were reported to be salivating with anticipation over the retreat, especially given the chance it offered to initiate the actor’s young nephew into the family tradition of “Enjoy the typos!” at a most intense and decisive phase.

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[In case any doubt remains, this was a spoof. Servetus writes under the assumption that Richard Armitage, having turned forty this year, is finally all grown up and can take it as it is meant, all in good fun. She also re-affirms herewith that fifteen years of employment in a university have revealed to her no necessary or automatic correlation between anyone’s ability to spell and punctuate English correctly and either his intelligence or his educational level. If necessary, any angsty discussion about this issue can be joined to last year’s angsty discussion about this issue.]

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Mr. Armitage’s JustGiving links. Think we could get to £15,000 by New Year?

~ by Servetus on December 25, 2011.